{"product_id":"holocaust-as-culture-book-imre-kertesz-9780857425805","title":"The Holocaust as Culture","description":"Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in  2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual  against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with  literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks  specifically to this relationship between the personal and the  historical.   In The Holocaust as Culture,Kertész recalls his childhood in  Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called  soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of  the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War  II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to  the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the  complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel  about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and  the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to  its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history  of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The  underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the  difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting  history, and how this challenges ideas of self.  The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a  talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of  Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear  that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of  the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper,  the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening  shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural  memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as  the vessels of this memory.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49572606476561,"sku":"GOR013515455","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857425803.jpg?v=1782382711","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/holocaust-as-culture-book-imre-kertesz-9780857425805","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}